90022 (Leonard Ave)

2022 - Sculpture (Sculpture)

165.1 x 129.54 x 5.08 cm

Guadalupe Rosales

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90022 (Leonard Ave) by Guadalupe Rosales engages with memory, loss, grief, and nostalgia; themes that run throughout the artist’s practice. The work features a vertical mirror onto which Rosales invited family and community members to etch the names of friends and relatives in a collective memorialization of those who have died or are absent. On the surface and the bespoke metal frame are hand-etched initials, names, symbols, and dates. They are born into the surface, similar to tattoos. And, like grief, they are irreversible. On the mirror, the engravings fade in and out of view distorted by a window screen; the glossy surface of the mirror is obscured by a moiré pattern that interrupts a clear reading or a complete image. Their names appear and disappear like spectres on the surface, recalling the trickiness of memory and our inability to fully grasp or perceive. The purpose of this work is to uplift private experiences and create space for them to be shared, to see what is concealed and collectively create a multidimensional experience. As a tribute to Rosales’s community, 90022 (Leonard Ave) is also named after an address in East Los Angeles, an area undergoing rapid change and gentrification. The work was featured in an exhibition entitled East of the River at Commonwealth and Council, focusing on the artist’s personal experience of her native East Los Angeles—a unique environment that is home to the single largest Chicano/Mexicano population in the country.

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Guadalupe Rosales is a multidisciplinary artist, activist, and educator. Rosales’s work documents Chicano/Latinx experiences in the United States, particularly in her native Los Angeles, using an expanding repository of communally sourced archival materials. She also makes installations that combine photography, ephemera, and sound, as well as archival work. Her projects exist as both physical object archives and crowd-sourced digital archives, which she curates on her widely-followed Instagram accounts @VeteranasandRucas and @MapPointz. Through an archival practice and participatory approach that celebrates other people’s voices, her works tell the stories of communities that are frequently underrepresented in official archives and public memory.

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Colors:

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• memory.n.01
• grief.n.01
• nostalgia.n.01
• community.n.01
• identity.n.01
• gentrification.n.01